Prior to the present invention, the technology of referring a debtor to a credit-counseling agency or other financial assistance provider could not be considered robust.
The generally excepted method for lenders (creditors) to refer consumers (debtors) to credit counseling agencies was to (a) tell them to their local yellow pages or (b) tell them to call one of two toll-free telephone numbers supported by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) or the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies (AICCCA). The prior method of making referrals was a one-to-one approach that utilized only existing telephones. In some cases, individual or multiple credit counseling agencies would establish relationships with creditors who in turn would make referrals directly to that or those agencies. In some cases, credit counseling agencies would produce manual or computer reports outlining which of the creditors customer(s) called the agency or agencies. In most cases, these reports were compiled after a predefined period often 30 to 60 days later. Where a creditor has multiple relationships and receives multiple reports then the data from each report has to be merged into a single summary report by the creditor requiring additional time and expense.
There is no known incidence of automated referral of a debtor to an intermediary or a second such referral from the intermediary to the financial assistance center, such as a credit agency. Thus, there was no known capturing of a referrer or lender identity, or caller or debtor identity, by say the intermediary for use in, say, tracking, reporting, or feedback to any of the parties involved. Nor would there be any automated referral criteria for selecting a financial assistance center (e.g., credit counseling agency, other lender, etc.), say, by computer logic that applies referral criteria to the call. Lenders would have little idea how the credit counseling agencies fared, and the agencies would nave no idea how they fared as compared with other agencies.
In sum, the industry has worked long and hard to collect on debts, and there is a plethora of lenders, troubled debt, and financial assistance centers, yet the known prior art has shortcomings that have left many inadequately addressed needs.